We’re building a modern workplace culture at Supportful

In a previous article, I wrote about the workplace culture habits I had to unlearn to build a culture we’d be proud of at Supportful.

In this article, written jointly with the talented Maria Scarzella Thorpe, we’ll talk about how we’re building a modern workplace at Supportful.

Fadi: The story goes back a few years. I founded the company with the intention of keeping it distributed, i.e., fully remote, because our core mission is to reduce the brain drain in Lebanon and preserve the human capital of its smaller communities.

Since then, I’ve been intentional about the culture I want the company to have. I joined the Running Remote community which helped me learn a great deal about how remote companies should work and the importance of designing culture deliberately.

One key way to do it was putting our four company values into practice: Growth, Ownership, Knowledge Sharing, and Transparency.

I understood the theory and was inspired to act on it, but I didn’t yet know how to implement it effectively.

With some serendipity, I met a People consultant who had previously worked at Netflix. She helped me audit what we had built so far and identify areas for improvement.

She met with most of the team members and analyzed their feedback alongside our existing onboarding and People Ops process. It was an eye-opening exercise that led to a more structured approach to building our culture.

As Supportful continued to grow, I realized it was time to take things a step further. And serendipity struck again.

As part of my Running Remote membership, I’m periodically matched with other community members. In 2025, I met Maria during a Donut coffee chat. What started as a casual conversation evolved into a collaboration that is helping shape Supportful’s culture in a more consistent and intentional way.

The culture work

Maria: When I started working with Fadi, the first step was understanding where things stood. To kick it off, I ran a culture audit, always my starting point for any culture strategy work. Listen, observe, and digest. It was also a chance to benchmark how the situation evolved a year after the first audit and understand what had shifted.

By having individual conversations with the team, I got an unfiltered picture of what Supportful felt like from the inside: what people valued most, where connection was strong, where it was missing, and how they experienced Supportful's culture day to day.

What stood out immediately was how personally people felt about Supportful. There was a strong emotional tie to the company, to its mission of keeping talented engineers in Lebanon, and to the trust and flexibility they'd been given.

And here's what I found most interesting: the majority felt a stronger sense of belonging to Supportful, not to the client, despite spending their days embedded in client teams. This speaks volumes about the foundation the company was built on: psychological safety, respectful boundaries, open communication, and real commitment to people's growth.

Three tracks to overcome one challenge

The audit pointed to the biggest challenge of all in a staff augmentation company: culture is always competing with the client's daily reality. Without intentional design, and true connection between people, it fades.

These findings shaped our initial cultural activation: three ongoing tracks of work designed to strengthen what was already there and close identified gaps.

1. Creating connection

At its core, this is about putting people first and creating conditions for genuine human connection. We started with an employee map so the team could know who is who, where everyone is, and what they have in common.

We built a predictable calendar of events, initiatives, and celebrations (both virtual and IRL) ranging from employee-led sessions to community-based activities where the team contributes locally.

We revived the Onboarding Buddy program, and are currently piloting Coffee Connect, an initiative that brings the team together in small rotating groups, a low-pressure way to build relationships that go beyond work.

2. Codifying the values

Our focus is on codifying how Supportful’s four values show up across the employee experience, making them tangible, not aspirational.

Starting with knowledge sharing, we kicked off monthly employee-led tech workshops to create a consistent learning culture driven by the team itself.

3. Mapping the culture moments that matter

This is one of the frameworks I use across all culture work: identifying the moments in the employee journey that shape how someone experiences the company, and designing for them with intention.

Without it, the other tracks risk being just initiatives. The mapping is what tells you where connection needs to happen and where values need to be felt. It's what makes the work strategic.

With an Employee Sentiment Survey coming up, we'll have more data to measure how these tracks are landing, and where we need to adjust. This work is never done; it evolves as the team does.

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